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Huawei Mate 20: the first hours with the phone that can charge other phones

17.10.2018

Translation: machine translated

Huawei presented the Mate 20 Pro in London. An English night with China's new flagship - my first impressions.

In retrospect, it's true that I sometimes open my mouth a bit too much. And I should have known better, because the smartphone market is evolving very quickly and manufacturers are doing everything they can to be the one to offer the mobile phone with the best camera, the prettiest screen, the smallest edges, etc.

What is it all about? Earlier this year, I said in a video that I thought the Huawei P20 Pro would be the phone of the year.

The Huawei P20 Pro will be the phone of the year.

It's entirely possible that it could happen, but the brand really needs to try hard. Huawei has given everything. And the effort has paid off. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro shows us what smartphones are capable of in 2018. At least that's what I think after testing the pre-production model in front of me for a few hours in a London hotel room.

The Twilight is darker

It was rather astonishing that yesterday Huawei officials uttered phrases like: "We already knew twilight rendered well. But we were still surprised by its success". Twilight is a new colour, which is actually a gradient. The colour has been revisited for the Mate 20 Pro. It now goes from blue to a purplish red tone, to black. I liked the black the best. With this dark contrast towards the bottom, the phone becomes more interesting, and immediately seems more powerful. At least that's my opinion. If this colour doesn't appeal to you, you can opt for the Mate 20 Pro in black and blue; the green should arrive on the market shortly before Christmas.

It's not the colour gradient or logos that dominate the back of the phone, but the cameras. The Huawei Mate 20 Pro has three cameras and a flash on the back. Unlike the P20 Pro or its Porsche version, they are not aligned, but arranged in a square. Opinions are divided and I'm still not sure what to make of it. Is it too rudimentary and sketchy? Or a bold design innovation that is even meant to be elegant?

TheMate 20 Pro's notch is large because Huawei has integrated a 3D scanner into it

The front, on the other hand, is nothing spectacular. Black, with a thin bezel: the fingerprint sensor under the glass. When the 6.39-inch and therefore 16.23cm AMOLED screen is working, you see a large notch on the Mate 20 Pro and a small notch on the Mate 20. And that's because the Pro version has a built-in 3D scanner. I would have liked to try it out quickly, but I have the impression that the corresponding application has not yet been installed on my pre-production model. It's only a postponement.

189 grams, with lots of stuff and the battery

Under the bonnet, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro shows for the first time what the Kirin 980 system-on-chip (SoC) has to offer. According to the manufacturer, the SoC is the fastest mobile platform on the market. Plus 6GB of RAM and a dual neural processing unit (NPU). The NPU learns from you. Most manufacturers offering phones with the same functions rely on the intelligence of the Cloud and very little on that of the smartphone itself. Huawei, on the other hand, has integrated two dedicated chips that simply learn from you and optimise the system according to your needs. This makes it difficult to calibrate the room. If you choose to do a benchmark test, you won't do it just once, but about 10 times and average the results. The problem: the NPU learns very quickly. This means that from the third run onwards, resources are deducted from other applications and allocated to the evaluation test.

Three cameras and a flash are arranged in a square

The phone behaves like this too: the Mate 20 Pro is fast. Ultrarapid. The funny thing is, I'm noticing it somewhere where I wasn't expecting it at all. I've been using SwiftKey as a keyboard for years now, and in the meantime I've managed to put a Swiss-German not bad at all on it. SwiftKey has a revolutionary feature: after analysing your emails and chat history, the keyboard can predict your messages. And in several languages at the same time. I can touch the suggestions at the top of the keyboard and write my messages very quickly. This mechanism has never been slow, but the Mate 20 Pro shows just how fast it can be.

The three cameras on the back are arranged like this:

40Mpx, f/1.8 wide-angle lens
20Mpx, f/2.2 ultra-wide-angle lens
8Mpx, telephoto lens with f/2.4 autofocus

The results:

The most English photo in human history.

Daytime results will be for another time. I notice that I prefer aperture mode to night mode. The latter does impressive things in software with little information on the image.

The smartphone charges other smartphones

In the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, the focus has been on charging technology. Not only does it charge very quickly, but you can also charge other phones with your Mate 20 Pro via wireless charging. Simply place the other phone, which should also have wireless charging, on the back of the Mate and off you go.

By the way, the Mate 20 Pro charges wirelessly just as fast as competitor models with the cable. Charging with the cable is a different story. According to the manufacturer, it's possible to charge 70% of the 4200mAh battery in 30 minutes. You could certainly achieve this after a few hours of testing with the charger. I don't think I've ever spent so much time playing with a charger before. Because Huawei delivers the charger with the necessary output. So you don't have to buy it separately. Unless you want a second one.

My first impression of the Mate 20 Pro? It's great. It's got what it takes to be phone of the year - yes, I dare say that again - and even if it isn't, it's still impressive and very pretty.